I mentioned earlier that Susan Stoner, author of the Sage Adair mystery series, and I are preparing for our YouTube book program, “Just Read it.” Our first 5 airings begin with a review of top paperback sellers listed in the New York Times. Recently, she and I met to compare notes

I went to a conference last weekend, one of those all day affairs that starts with coffee and bear claws, is followed by a high caloric lunch and ends with coffee and cookies in the late afternoon. To my right, at my table, sat a portly woman with a pleasant face. She was biting into

Woman on the Scarlet Beast will be produced in January 2015 and since I made that announcement, readers have queried me about what it takes to get a play staged. As this will be my first and probably my last work for theater, I’ve decided to document the process and publish the epis

Scientists are beginning to think that play, rather than competition, is the ruling principle of the universe. Play, in this case, means an entity’s free exercise of its powers for no higher purpose than because it can. (“Do Atoms Play?” by David Graeber, The Baffler, excerpted

Now that big data collection is here, there’s no way to put the genie back into the bottle. That’s what Craig Mundie, Senior Adviser at Microsoft thinks. He suggests people who spend time arguing about how to control data mining are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

A friend of mine is going through some adversity at the moment. When we met for coffee, I did my best to cheer her up. Trouble, I reminded her, can be the source of insight. As she’s a writer, I pretended my remark would bring a smile to her lips. An artist is supposed to suffer, ri

Before she died, I had a phone conversation with my stepmother who was 98 years-old at the time. I asked her how her day was going and she cheerfully replied she’d had a wonderful morning visiting her mother and father. She wasn’t lying. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s diseas

If there’s a child anywhere in the world who hasn’t attended a gathering where ghost stories were told, I’d like to meet that extraordinary youngster. Scaring ourselves with tales from the grave is a rite of passage and given the number of horror films that are popular, we seem

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.” This line from Thomas Gray’s, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” exhorts us to honor the lives of ordinary people. While Fate may turn a blind eye upon the many, the poem reminds us that Nature bestows a gift to each of

Some people assume privacy is a right granted by the US Constitution, but it isn’t. The word appears nowhere in the document. The Supreme Court drew inferences to that right in 1965 through provisions in the 1st, 5th, 9th and 14th amendments. However, court interpretations can chang